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http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Came her to say this. The quote from TFS:
"Google Glass tells her what to do should she forget, for example, which part goes where."

A quote from 'Manna':
"It tells you exactly what to do. Like, It told me to get four new bags from the rack. When I did that it told me to go to trash can #1. Once I got there it told me to open the cabinet and pull out the trash can. Once I did that it told me to check the floor for any debris..."

I know that Google Glass isn't actually giving 'orders' in the same way that Manna is; but at this rate, can the day when that happens be very far off? For about a century now we've had public schools whose express purpose is to stunt intellectual and emotional growth in order to produce a pliant and compliant population suitable to be "human resources" which, just like "natural resources", are effectively raw materials for a production economy. Now those 'resources' are increasingly allocated and directed by the nascent AI's that are now ubiquitous and are approaching an unprecedented kind of autonomy. The use of Google Glass on the factory floor is just the thin edge of the wedge.

In the past schools' main purpose was to teach children how to be cheap industry workers. This feels like the past may be coming back.

What you say is correct, except that 'the past' isn't coming back, because it never left. Also, the real purpose of public education goes far beyond creating a cheap workforce. And lest you think that latter page is the fantasy of conspiracy theory nutters, read Gatto's 'Underground History of American Education', then check the references he sites. American public schools were designed, and are being maintained and modified on an ongoing basis, specifically to stunt the intellectual and emotional growth of citizens who might otherwise a) be a source of unbridled innovation that puts the long term plans of the corporatocracy at risk, and b) start to question their own relative servitude and powerlessness. Again, the historical record on this is clear and unambiguous.

The next time you talk or think about 'sheeple', ask yourself why so many people are like that; then ask yourself in how many ways you yourself may have been stunted by a school system which was designed by smart, determined people specifically for that purpose. At that point you might want to have a closer look at the earlier educational systems upon which our modern one was modelled.

John Taylor Gatto might be a good start.

http://4brevard.com/choice/Public_Education.htm

Gatto says the point of public education is to produce identically trained, docile workers; suitable for cannon fodder or wage slavery. He quotes John D. Rockefeller's LETTER NO 1. OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD: "We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply.

And, of course, the "liberals" had little or nothing to do with it. It was plutocrats, mostly. According to Gatto, anyway.

My stepson moved to the U.S. from Eastern Europe when he was in 4th grade. When he went to school here he found out that the curriculum was 3 years behind, so in 5th, 6th and 7th grade he was still going over material he had covered already. Just FYI, U.S. public schools were created and designed to spew blue collar workers capable of self-discipline and mundane tasks. They were never meant to encourage creativity. Just enduring long dull robotic workdays.

School is here mainly to teach obedience, to domesticate children.

"The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn -- nor is it supposed to. Schools were conceived to serve the economy and the social order rather than kids and families -- that is why it is compulsory. As a consequence, the school can not help anybody grow up, because its prime directive is to retard maturity. It does that by teaching that everything is difficult, that other people run our lives, that our neighbors are untrustworthy even dangerous. "

More here.

Feeling crazy in such an environment is normal reaction.

Waaaah! Waaah! Big bad guhv'nmint iz takin' our monieezzz! Dey shoodn't taxez mine, just the lib'rals dat i h8tez!

fix'd

And your true colors shine through. /bullshit or GTFO.

I say this as an American: we've become barbarians. We torture people. We incarcerate more people, both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis, than any other nation in the world, and think it's okay to gang-rape 1% of our population. Our wealth is distributed like that of a banana republic. We're stupid, vapid, and like a feral child, we snarl and bite when someone tries to help us. America really is the sick man of the world, and personally, I'm about ready to give up and pronounce the disease incurable. We can argue about causes and solutions, but you can't deny that we're in a steep decline. As George Orwell write,

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

(active/total)
United States 5,735/9,960
Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) 5,830/16,000
United Kingdom France 350
People's Republic of China 400
India 75-110
Pakistan 65-110
statistics provided by the Natural Resources Defense Council

As for brains, http://4brevard.com/choice/international-test-scor es.htm says differently. Our 4th graders made the best showing of all the categories, coming in at #12. However, it is an incomplete list of countries. Singapore, Korea, and Japan, who dominate grades 4 and 8, are absent from the 12th grade list. However you look at it, it's bad.

Regardless, we do have the advantage of having done things with space no other country has... but back in the 60s and 70s. Innovation in the U.S. has been dragging for decades, we should and easily could have had a manned base on the moon and on Mars by now, and we could even have been in good shape to start mining the asteroids. I look at America's space program, and I see not only all the great stuff we've done, but all the really great stuff we could have done and haven't.